Paradise Lost
More than any other literary forebear, John
Milton's Paradise Lost stands as a continuing intellectual and
mythic reference point for Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Published
as an epic poem in ten books in 1667, it was restructured for its second
edition of twelve books in the year of Milton's death, 1674. Although
immediately recognized as a masterpiece, its influence in its own time was
minor due in large part to Milton's radical individualistic politics and
puritan theology, which were associated with sedition after the
Restoration of Charles II in 1660. A generation later, after the
Bloodless Revolution of 1688 extended the popular mandate by revising
Britain's government from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy, the
poem's influence remained modest, to the generation of Pope more a stumbling block and inhibition
than an inspiration. It was undoubtedly a monument, but in both style and
thought it seemed out of step with the age.
All that was to change by the end of the eighteenth century, when for
complex and even contradictory reasons, ranging from the recovery of
Renaissance culture to sudden pressures for political reform, Paradise
Lost claimed an unquestionable prominence, even preeminence, among the
treasures of English literary art and began to exert a broad influence on
the emerging literature of Romanticism. Although the impact can
be felt on every one of the major Romantic poets, as well as on dozens of
minor ones as well, it is a curious and even wonderful truth that nowhere
in this rich literature does Milton's epic resonate as richly and subtly
as in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. That has been attributed by
some critics to the orchestration of Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was a
devoted follower of "the sacred Milton," as he referred to him in the Preface to Prometheus Unbound,
and continually allowed his own work to resonate with deliberate allusions
to Paradise Lost. Undoubtedly, he helped Mary with the polishing of
her Miltonic textures, providing the epigraph, for example (X.743-45). But with a writing
partnership that up to this point in England had only the short-lived
relationship of Wollstonecraft and
Godwin as a model, there is no reason
to attribute the origin of any particular idea or theme to Percy Bysshe
Shelley simply because he was older or male. And, indeed, it is possible
to read his later comments on Paradise Lost in the Preface to
Prometheus Unbound (1820) or in "A Defence of Poetry" (1821) as revealing how powerful
an influence Mary's novel shed on his own conceptions of the work. On
whomever the decision to foreground Milton's poem rests, Mary Shelley did
write the novel and therefore is responsible for the complex patterns of
allusion that amplify and contextualize her modernization of Western
creation myths.
